She immediately felt deprived and missed him already. It was depressing how vital he’d started to become to her very existence. The pain of being denied made her eyes glisten with teary disappointment. She didn’t know what to say to him, what to do, where to look. Her only thought was to get out of there as fast as possible. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. Damn, you’re making me feel like a perv.” She started backing out of his office, but he moved swiftly around her and blocked her path.
“No, don’t leave like this. You know how I feel and how things have to be between us.”
“I have work to do, Mr. Ragnarson. Is there anything else you need from me?”
“I need you to understand.”
“I do understand. I will talk to Susan about acquisitions, and I’ll talk to Colt about taking over my divorce case. We need to stop torturing each other like this. Now do us both a damn favor and stay away from me.” Nakia hurried around him, and this time he didn’t try to stop her.
Two weeks later, Justin was still no closer to deciding what to do to repair his relationship with Nakia. He missed her like crazy, which made it almost impossible to stay away from her. What she didn’t realize was how hard he’d fought to not take what she was offering, to not give in to their desire. Wanting, needing her had become an obsession. His heart ached to be with her, to see her, to hear her voice, to touch her. While he was awake, he had a fighting chance, but as soon as he closed his eyes, his subconscious took over and he got to experience the things his conscious self wouldn’t allow. Not even Melissa’s presence beside him muted his thoughts.
His dream always started innocent enough. The night before, his dream had seemed too real. They had been having a heated debate about a child custody case. They were not alone however; they had been joined by two other lawyers in the firm, lawyers more senior than Nakia because the children in question were worth billions. Their parents had died, leaving them a fortune but without a clear-cut guardian. Nakia had been arguing for the children to be given over to the maternal elderly grandparents. The other two senior lawyers had disagreed and wanted the children to be raised by their father’s sister and her husband.
He had sat back in his leather chair and watched her every move and was enthralled with every word out of her mouth. It wasn’t so much that what she was saying was turning him on, but it was her no-holds-barred fight for what she believed in. She was animated, articulate, smart, and sexy as hell in a dark magenta fitted dress, cinched at the waist with a gold-plated narrow belt. That dress always had a devastating impact on him. And as soon as the other two lawyers had left the boardroom, he’d been on her. No hesitation, no question. She was his, and her body in that dress was like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull.
He devoured her lips, and she returned his kiss with equal fervor. Never mind that an entire wall of the room was comprised of glass windows and that anyone could see what they were doing. That still did not deter him from pushing her onto her stomach to the large gleaming surface of the boardroom table. The papers they’d been working on went flying to the floor in frenzied disarray. He’d impatiently pulled the hem of her skirt over her ass and to her waist. At the sight of her lacy pink thong in the cleft of her sexy round ass, which perfectly accentuated the creamy softness of her brown skin, he’d stilled. He got painfully hard in seconds. Any functioning brain cells in his head lost the fight, and he plunged into her heat.
Hours later, he was still cursing the fact that his phone had gone off at that moment. He’d woken up aching and pissed.
The telephone call was a summons that he couldn’t ignore. He and a few other members of Special Forces were called in for a special assignment. Their group wasn’t used for the run-of-the-mill assignments. If they were called in, it was a matter of urgent national security. No, it wasn’t a call he could sleep through.
Unfortunately, he had to buy a new phone because he smashed his cellphone against the wall in his bedroom as soon as he disconnected from his superiors, waking Melissa in the process. She hadn’t been amused by his temper. Thankfully, she was more interested in getting more sleep than what was troubling him.
When he saw Nakia walk into the boardroom later that morning for the clients’ meeting in a fitted red dress with the hem stopping just above her knees, matching killer heels that made her incredible legs look longer, he was again thrown into a tailspin of excruciating lust. He’d barely paid attention to the meeting after that. Everything about her seemed fashioned just for him. He knew more than ever that she was the woman of his heart, but there was nothing he could do about it. He was married, period.
He wanted to tell her that they’d gotten Linda and her children into a safe place before they approached the judge. However, that didn’t end how he’d thought it would. Instead of fighting them and coming after them with all the political and criminal arsenal they knew the judge welded, the judge pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head. It seemed that the judge was afraid of the death he’d suffer under the hands of Baldacci.
Justin would’ve been happy with that outcome if it had gotten them Baldacci as well. With the file that he’d taken from Nakia, they were able to dig up even more damning evidence that would have put the judge away for life and given Baldacci the death penalty. However, now, thanks to the local news reports, Baldacci was aware of their visit with the judge before his suicide. Since then, the firm had three break-ins and several attempted hacks into their systems. They had to consider that they now had the mob on their asses. Too bad for them though. Nothing relating to the judge was in the firm’s records.
When he had taken the file from Nakia, he’d had Imani wipe the firm’s servers, Nakia’s computer in the office, and her personal computer, which further cost him her trust. She had only stayed at the firm because Colt had talked her out of leaving. Justin knew that Nakia had no idea how they’d invaded her privacy. She didn’t know of the security measures they’d placed around her. If she did, there’d be a shitshow all around.
Now that he’d gotten his orders from the Pentagon, he only had twenty-four hours to get his shit together to leave for the mission. Their elite team had been given no idea of the length of time for this mission, and he had a bad feeling about this one. So, it wasn’t surprising that after sorting his files for Colt to complete whatever needed to be done, he found himself sitting outside Nakia’s apartment building at nine thirty at night determined to see her before he had to leave.
Although he had a key to her apartment—a fact he was sure she’d forgotten—he’d had every intention of ringing her doorbell, except that he heard her scream, followed by a loud crash. He kicked her door in and stopped short at the sight of Nakia standing over a man with a gun in her hand.
She looked up at him with a frown of incredibility as if to say, ‘what the hell?’, but then looked back at the man on floor with cool focus. “Ralph, I’m going to give you a fair chance, which you didn’t give me,” she drawled. “Leave before I put a bullet in your ass. You come near me again, touch me again, and I’ll kill you.”